Traité de Physique Elémentaire

Abstract

THE third edition of this well-known handbook of French physics deserves more than a casual notice. We are told in the preface that it has been entirely recast by the second of the two original authors, M. Fernet, a pupil of the lamented Verdet, who has caught something of the spirit of his master. There has been no teacher of physics in our time whose work has been, on the whole, comparable to that of Verdet. He has all the clearness of Tyndall; and, as almost all of his published lectures were delivered to audiences more strictly scientific than those to whom the famous books on Sound and Heat were originally presented, he is never diffuse. His arrangement of the essential points of his subject, and his grouping of the illustrative details and of the exceptions to the general principles which govern it, have scarcely been equalled even in France, which is the special country of precise and exhaustive exposition. It is high praise, therefore, to say of M. Fernet, that in parts his book recalls his master's method and style.

Traité de Physique Elémentaire.

Par Ch. Drion et E. Fernet. Troisième Edition. (Paris: V. Masson et Fils. 1869.)